App Store sales tracking

So now that Trollwerks is actually an active publisher (and it’s going well so far, thank you; a perfect five-star review record! Woo-hoo! ‘Course, that is out of a very limited sample, “two” to be exact, but hey) we’ve got to sort out plans for making reports to our authors, and the tax man, and yadayadayada. And Apple’s sales reports are … not the most elegant. So we dug around a bit, and here’s a roundup of what we found.

PART 1: DESKTOP APPLICATIONS

First off, there’s omz:software’s AppSales — no longer being developed, and the author recommends what appears to be by far the most popular desktop application, Ideaswarm’s AppViz. [EDIT: Discontinued.] Certainly couldn’t be any easier, all you do is enter your iTunes Connect ID and password and it goes off and fetches all your reports, and makes pretty graphs. And as an extra convenience, fetches all your reviews too. So for the next while, we’ll see how we get on with that . If it seems reliable, hey we may not be motivated to look further. But if we are, there’s a just slightly cheaper desktop application called iPhone Sales Report [EDIT: Discontinued.] to check out as well, although our superficial impression is that AppViz is more complete. And prettier. It’s all about the pretty.

[EDIT: Then here’s this AppStore Clerk application — with source, no less — but it only parses downloaded reports; and there’s this new one App Store Sales [EDIT: Discontinued.] which looks like an AppViz competitor…]

PART 2: IPHONE APPLICATIONS

We’re not too sure that we’re obsessive enough to actually want to carry a sales checker app around on the phone, especially since the main point here is to easily pass individual reports along, but there’s two choices here. First off, there’s AppSales Mobile, the mobile relative of the above-mentioned orphan AppSales, which is not only free but [EDIT: on github!] Which would make that a most excellent choice if we wanted to add our own automation, no doubt. There is also Sales Report, “The Must-Have App for iPhone Developers” [EDIT: Discontinued] — but for $14.99 and not open source, we’re probably not going to bother looking any closer at that one if AppSales Mobile is anywhere close to whatever our mobile needs might turn out to be.

[EDIT: And then there’s this poor fellow who had “MyAppSales” rejected for … doing the same exact thing as “Sales Report”. Apple, gotta love ’em. But he’s selling the source code for $15!]

PART 3: WEB SERVICES

Whilst we have an instinctual bias towards things that run, you know, on our computer and don’t need a network to be functional — particularly since getting the appropriate applications’ reports extracted and prepared for delivery is just the kind of task we’d relegate to our out of network reach time by choice — there’s always a place for the cloud thing too. In this category we have Heartbeat [EDIT: Discontinued.], a really quite comprehensive solution to not just formatting Apple’s reports but all sorts of other goodies as well. However, we’re thinking that it’s just plain too expensive for what we need. At least at the moment. We’ll keep an eye on this one. An apparent future competitor currently in beta is AppStatz [EDIT: Discontinued.], but it’s just not looking in the same class as Heartbeat so far.

There’s a variety of homebrew solutions, strategies, and snippets we stumbled across of possible usefulness. We’re pretty sure if we decided to actually put some work into something we’d start with the AppSales Mobile source, but we’ll list them here for completeness.

Comments (7)

FileitupApril 12, 2009 at 4:27 pm

Thank's for adding a link to appFigures.
Just wanted to update you and let you know that appFigrues beta 2.0 has been released earlier today with a ton of new features such as automated report importing on a daily schedule directly from iTunes Connect, support for daily and weekly reports, updated interface, and much more.
(And unlike Heartbeat our service is completely free while in beta and will never be as expensive even when it comes out of beta.)
So check it out and feel free to give us your feedback.
Thanks.

We released first public version our utility AppStore Sales.
AppStore Sales it’s small utility for monitoring purchases your application in AppStore.
Features:
Support daily, weekly and monthly reports.
Auto-downloads daily reports from iTunesConnect
Detail information for daily downloads. Count of purchases, updates and re-downloads.
Summary information for all application
Various graph
Count of new downloads in dock bange
You can download it from bananadev.com
Thanks.